Complex Systems: Ideas From Physics

In this talk I shall present certain common features of complex many-body systems. The appearance of scale-invariance, power laws and emergent behaviour in these systems has long interested physicists, who have made various attempts to understand it. Self-organized criticality (SOC) is one such mechanism proposed to explain the common dynamical state of several of these complex systems. I shall present a brief sketch of the main ideas behind SOC, and some examples.